This article critically reviews international literature on the social aspects of vertical living. It identifies three research approaches – the built environment effect, the differentiated built environment effect, and the human-environment interrelation – and two focal social orientations of research – suitability and experience – as well as four spatial orientations – space, design, verticality and volume, and technology. The article emphasises the need to extend the scope of future research beyond the building to the residential complex, clusters of complexes, and the entire city in order to better understand relations between volume and experience. It also calls for a more complex investigation of the vertical dwelling experience that would include residential aspirations, new neighbourly roles, and identities.

The socio-demographic context, which includes the co-residence patterns associated with the decisions of young adults on whether to live in the parental household or enter homeownership or renting, is directly reflected in homeownership rates at the aggregate level as a consequence of these decisions. However, the way in which tenure statistics are reported also matters in this respect. This applies specifically to household-level statistics, which are most often used to characterise housing systems. It is therefore possible to ask whether countries with high homeownership rates and, simultaneously, high shares of adult children living with their parents are truly high-homeownership societies. This study identifies the countries for which the reported tenure statistics are more influenced by demographic conditions as compared to other countries. These are the Mediterranean countries and the Central and Eastern European countries (with some exceptions).

Since the 1990s it has become common for central banks to be charged with using interest rates to meet consumer price inflation (CPI) targets. This article examines the cases of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Bank of England (BoE) and finds that whereas the RBA’s CPI target includes a housing cost element, the BoE’s does not. Moreover, it finds that contrasting treatments of housing costs produce different results, depending on whether the index includes mortgage interest as a housing cost. Whilst central banks dislike CPIs that include an element of mortgage interest because of the apparently perverse outcome of increasing interest rates, they also lack credibility by excluding such an important element of the cost of living. Credibility demands that the 30-year consensus on inflation targeting by monetary policy be replaced by a broader set of tools – including fiscal policy – to control inflation.

Many aspects of the global economy changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, including the real estate market. This study examines the primary residential property market in Opole during the Covid-19 pandemic. It uses property transaction data from 2018 to 2021 to conduct statistical analyses and independent group tests and also takes into account the real-estate price trend from 2014 to 2020. The study finds that both property prices and preferences relating to the structure and location of housing changed during the pandemic. In the case of Opole, the number of transactions involving residential units in the primary market increased in 2020 compared to previous years. After adjusting the unit price value of residential properties for the trend in the pre-pandemic period, the study finds that there was also an increase in property transaction prices. The study confirms three important facts relating to phenomena that are occurring globally in cities today. First, local communities are more diverse in terms of the economic heterogeneity of real estate buyers. Second, unlike big urban areas, small cities may be more resistant to the process of citizens migrating to suburban areas, thereby limiting the negative phenomenon of urban sprawl. Third, the housing real estate market in small cities is considered a reliable form of investment of assets, as real estate prices increased during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this article we show that significant differences between the foreign currency mortgage agreements in Hungary and Poland led to significant differences in monthly mortgage payments after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) erupted. Hungarian banks were able to add a variable markup to the LIBOR3M that was connected to bank risk on top of the usual fixed markup. We compare the monthly mortgage payments and LTV levels of people who took out a CHF mortgage with those who obtained a local currency mortgage during the mortgage boom years of 2006–2008. We find that in the initial years of the mortgage CHF mortgages were cheaper than local currency mortgages, which allowed more people to buy housing. However, the GFC led to a deterioration of the exchange rate, and monthly payments and LTV levels (consequently?) increased. We analyse the mortgage costs and LTV levels of the 2006-2008 foreign currency (FX) mortgage vintages in Hungary and Poland between 2006 and 2020 and compare them to local currency mortgages. We also simulate the effects of changing housing prices and wages on mortgages in the cities of Budapest and Warsaw.

This article investigates the structural underpinnings of gender dissimilarities in homelessness from a comparative perspective. The Gender Dissimilarity Index is introduced as a simple measure for quantifying the unevenness of the distribution of men and women across the ETHOS-light categories. Three gendered aspects of the welfare state are considered and compared for Norway, Belgium, and Poland: employment and childcare, housing, and homelessness policies. Based on available data, it appears that the most uneven distribution of genders may indicate a combination of the promotion of the male breadwinner model and relatively broad support for people who are homeless, but also the shortage of affordable housing. A more gender-balanced homeless population may be the result of a combination of housing-led approaches and degenderising policies. However, a similar distribution may be attributed to states with implicitly genderising policies coupled with ‘traditional’ attitudes towards gender roles and a lack of adequate responses to women’s needs.

Even before the 2008/9-crisis but certainly afterwards, trends in labour, housing and mortgage markets combined with welfare reform, making it more difficult for each new cohort of young Europeans (25-34) to complete the transition to ‘residential independence’, particularly to become a homeowner. This paper explores ‘trends in homeownership opportunities’, using data from EU-SILC (2005-2018). It takes a broader perspective by exploring trends in its social selectivity, as well as changes in the ‘attributes’ of homeownership over time. Young adults’ homeownership opportunities have declined almost everywhere in Europe, but to varying extents. Furthermore, a more socially selective group of young homeowners seems to be entering properties of lower quality in locations with fewer services. Deteriorating homeownership opportunities are strongly associated with mortgage lending restrictions, indicating that trends in housing and broader financial markets/policies are important explanatory factors. I also find indications that the transition to homeownership is being pushed beyond the commonly-used age-threshold of 34 years.

The changing world economy since the 1970s and the decrease in welfare and deregulation in the Global North have led to an inefficient and declining stock of affordable housing. In the Global South, the need to economically catch up with the Global North has led to a lack of sustainable affordable housing policies. Social and affordable housing policies in the Global South have been either non-existent or very inefficient. The aim of this short paper is to start a discussion (and contribute to the existing ones) on how the social dynamics of informal settlements may be a source of new approaches to the provision of affordable housing in the Global North and South. Despite their illegal status and characterisation as urban blight, informal settlements are frequently illustrative examples of collaborative processes in the areas of planning and development that depend on the social connections and relationships among squatter households.

The article describes the approach and method of Family Housing Pathways. This process of gathering and presenting data makes it possible to include the extended family’s housing resources, the management of these resources, and the transformations of households within a family. Twenty-eight Family Housing Pathways were gathered and collected as part of an assignment given to students as part of an undergraduate course on housing problems. The exercise shed light on recurring themes in the transformation of the housing system in Poland that influence individual and family management of housing resources. Even a sample of relatively privileged families demonstrates that housing is clearly a crucial dimension, especially in times of transition, e.g. in post-communist Poland after 1989. The Family Housing Pathways approach could be a promising tool as well as an approach that combines biographical and historical housing perspectives, without losing sight of concerns of a practical and ethical nature.

Historically, the main focus of the study of housing in advanced economies has been on houses that meet the accommodation needs of households: houses as the main residence of families. In recent decades there has been the growth in the numbers of houses used for purposes other than as a main residence, for example in the forms of the recent global spread of Airbnb and of foreign engagement in housing as an investment tool. Specifically, the advance of disruptive, financialized technologies in various sectors has meant that alongside a set of ‘for housing’ houses (FHH) another, overlapping, set of ‘not for housing’ houses (NFHH) is emerging. The present paper begins by identifying four types of NFHH, and considers the significance of their growth. It argues that while the NFHH sector is relatively small it has large impacts, and these are such that they challenge housing researchers and policy makers to develop additional ways of looking at housing systems.